"Needles and Opium" at ACT

ACT photo by Tristram Kenton

For some reason, our regular subscription tickets to see Needles and Opium at ACT's Geary Theater were for the Saturday afternoon of closing weekend, so I didn't get to see it in time to make meaningful (or at least, useful) recommendations to others. So I will just give my impressions, because the show has now closed.

ACT offered this show in collaboration with a number of Canadian artists, most critically, writer and director Robert LePage, with the staging produced by Ex Machina. And that, too, is important, because the staging is one of the stars of the show. Just about every review I saw of this production talked more about the stagecraft than about the play and acting, which is usually not a good sign at all. Luckily, in this case, the play itself is strong enough to at least hold its own with the flashy staging.

The Play

Here I would normally give a quick synopsis of the plot and characters and such, but truly, that's not very meaningful here. Needles and Opium isn't a narrative as much as a kind of dreamlike, stream of (sort of) consciousness depiction of some impressions of actual events. In short, it's hard to describe. The jazz artist Miles Davis (portrayed by Wellesley Robertson III) plays a large role, as do the French writer Jean Cocteau and other characters who may or may not be based on LePage (all played by Olivier Normand). But all the action, scenes, impressions, and so on, play out not on the stage per se, but rather in and on a cube suspended above the stage, full of trap doors and other openings, lighted with projections and sometimes populated with props. So it's all an elaborate performance, not quite a play, not quite dance, but all quite striking, visually and emotionally.

This brightly-lighted, ever-changing cube captures our focus and imagination, but now and then one can't help but realize it's just a small zone in the middle of an otherwise dark stage. The surreal and phantasmagorical scenes that play out in the cube are all the more potent in contrast to the void around them.

Summary

I'm not even going to try to convey my impressions of the action. I had favorite moments, such as one where a hotel room in Paris rotates and transforms itself into ... another, different view of the same room. It's just magical. And watching Miles Davis slowly descending into drugs and depression, literally sliding down the slope of the cube, one totally gets that he's on Skid Row in every sense. There are plenty of other terrific uses of the cube, the music, the lighting, and so on. But I don't think I can convey any real sense of what the show was.

Suffice it to say that it was one of the more striking and effective uses of stagecraft I've ever seen, in a way that will probably color my notions of what is possible to accomplish on stage going forward. And that's always worthwhile.

Sorry I didn't get to see it in time to recommend it to others; It was really quite good. But like all theater (and perhaps more than most), it was ephemeral. I'm sure it will be produced elsewhere, so keep your eyes open.